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Author Topic: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice  (Read 442200 times)

Playergamer

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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #1860 on: July 12, 2016, 09:34:38 am »

#LightningRodLivesMatter.
Cool story bro. When lightning starts striking black people at 2.5 times the rate of white people, give me a call.
Eh, your comparison is a bit off. You mean "when black people stand on top of lightning rods 2.5 times the rate of white people, and are struck by lightning at 2.5 times the rate of white people."
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sluissa

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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #1861 on: July 12, 2016, 10:13:28 am »

AND not painting every single PO with the same brush. That kind of thinking never works out well for any group.

Hah, that just gave me a mental image of changing the police uniforms. Instead of using only one colour uniform, uniforms in all colours of the rainbow would be randomly distributed amongst the officers, to make them look more friendly and diverse.

There was the Montreal police that decided to do something like that... but for completely different reasons.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
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SalmonGod

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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #1862 on: July 12, 2016, 11:40:34 am »

#LightningRodLivesMatter.
Cool story bro. When lightning starts striking black people at 2.5 times the rate of white people, give me a call.
Eh, your comparison is a bit off. You mean "when black people stand on top of lightning rods 2.5 times the rate of white people, and are struck by lightning at 2.5 times the rate of white people."

Pretty sure this has been studied to death, and the research shows that white people engage in illegal activity just as much as black people.  They're just not policed as heavily, and given more leniency in court.  I know for certain it's been proven repeatedly that black people get harsher sentences for exactly the same crimes.
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Playergamer

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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #1863 on: July 12, 2016, 11:49:38 am »

I wasn't talking about general crime, SG. I was talking about the percentage of cop-killers by race, versus the number killed by cops.
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Helgoland

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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #1864 on: July 12, 2016, 04:37:52 pm »

AND not painting every single PO with the same brush. That kind of thinking never works out well for any group.
Feels good though.
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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #1865 on: July 14, 2016, 02:15:54 am »

I wasn't talking about general crime, SG. I was talking about the percentage of cop-killers by race, versus the number killed by cops.
Always gotta be careful with statistics and make sure you're presenting them fairly, rather than to support a position.

As I noticed from a check around the internet for total number of cops killed and the races of the killers, the data are from various years, but generally it's about 50~55% white cop-killers, 25~30% black, then hispanic and other races making up the rest.

If you THEN take that number and compare it against the total population to get something like a % of cop-killers per million people by race you can come up with the 2.5 times more likely number you did.

Similarly, most years that you check you will find more white people killed by cops in total, but the percentage of the total population means it is much less likely for someone to be killed by a cop if they are white.

Another fun fact, I can't find a source that lists less than 80% of cop-killers having priors, with an alarmingly high percentage of prior murder/manslaughter type convictions.
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Helgoland

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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #1866 on: July 14, 2016, 06:31:42 pm »

So this is pretty interesting. Turns out bodycams aren't that great a tool after all - go click that link and see how well you interpret that footage.

I'd like to add that to a European the way those situations are set up looks fucking ridiculous. Here officers aren't nearly as afraid of the populace.
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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #1867 on: July 14, 2016, 06:47:22 pm »

Hmh.
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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #1868 on: July 14, 2016, 07:13:59 pm »

Maybe they could repurpose those little quadcopters you sometimes see at concerts and whatnot, plus a little IR strobe on their uniform somewhere so the thing can track them. That's probably too expensive to implement, but it might be interesting to see.
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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #1869 on: July 14, 2016, 07:16:23 pm »

@Helgoland
No you're right, those situations are set up to look fucking ridiculous.  Has nothing to do with America, though.  They're specifically set up to show that body cams can be confusing, which is true!

I totally agree that body cams can be very confusing, and they could have just made that point.  But these scenarios are as educational as a Punch and Judy show, and just as snarkily political.
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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #1870 on: July 14, 2016, 07:24:01 pm »

Spoiler: I agree with Rolan7 (click to show/hide)
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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #1871 on: July 14, 2016, 07:35:03 pm »

It helps that you folks over there don't have 89 guns for every 100 people or a fairly large set of demographics that (not without reason) hate and fear police.

I mentioned this before, but it's essentially a self-perpetuating cycle at this point. A lot of people are raised to be scared of and distrust cops (and, in other words, are more likely to flee or resist) and cops are trained to be hyperaware of the potential that they could be attacked or killed in even routine interactions over minor infractions and that the appropriate way to avert that risk is to maintain total control of confrontations. So you've got cops who don't feel like they belong to the populations that they're supposed to be protecting and serving and citizens who see cops as hostile intruders in their communities.

That is, I suspect, how more than a few of these shootings happen: both parties are scared that the other is going to try to hurt or kill them for no reason.

Incidentally, that's one of the main issues I have with the popular position on police violence, the massively hypocritical double standard. Black men commit a vastly disproportionate number of violent crimes, and that's treated as exclusively a social issue, often completely ignoring the fact that there was still a choice made to commit those crimes (not to diminish the impact of poverty, the CIA's efforts to flood U.S. cities with hard drugs and the fallout from that, &c.). But when police are unnecessarily violent and too ready to use lethal force, that's thrown out the window. None of the social conditioning imposed on them matters, they're just racist shitheads willing to ruin their lives to kill some guy they don't know from Adam.

That's why I have a problem with the regressive left's approach to the problem of police brutality, as with so many other things. It's a clusterfuck of hypocrisy that ignores all nuance in favor of establishing a hierarchy of victimhood. Yeah, protest like hell about this bullshit, it's completely fucked up that U.S. cops do this. But trying to resolve it on a case-by-case punishment after-the-fact basis is about as pointless as trying to reduce the incidence of violent crime with harsher prison sentences and fewer opportunities for released felons. The root of the problem is the fearful, militarized police culture which has very strong ties to the cultures of police hatred and gun-worship; so long as guns are freely available to criminals and anti-government nuts and more than a few subsets of the population hate and fear police, they'll continue to justify their treatment of U.S. citizens as enemies and streets as battlefields. So long as police continue to kill people for little or no reason, those same populations will continue to justify their negative attitudes toward police.

This is what I've been getting at. It's not something that you can band-aid patch. It's a serious, complex social ill which is closely tied to numerous other fundamental issues with criminal law, weapon ownership, and class divisions. Beating up protestors, closing ranks on post-shooting investigations, calling cops racists for following their training and permissive local/state laws about the use of force, murdering cops on the streets/in their homes? None of that does shit to solve anything, but it serves to obfuscate the real issues and make self-serving assholes feel good about themselves while also making it even more difficult to institute the sort of multi-front comprehensive changes that are necessary to truly resolve these problems.


But yeah. Body cams are shit. That could have been predicted without them ever entering service. Maybe they'll have a placebo effect of sorts, discouraging officers from using excessive force for fear of documentation? Because nobody's ever been dragged out of sight of dashcams to get the ol' boot in, and there's definitely no way to get the same effective outcome when using bodycams. Still better than the he-said she-said of eyewitness reports, and ain't that a sad standard to exceed.


--
And it's still the same old saw. A cop's being a dick? So what? Comply, and if he tries to fuck with you, don't give any excuse. Don't resist, sue after. Plenty of organizations happy to take on police brutality cases, after all. It's shitty that we have to live like that, but if you seriously think that being a cocky smartass is entertaining enough to risk your life, you're touched in the head. If you see a video of someone being "attacked" by cops who are trying to cuff him, and he's not cuffed inside of 2-3 seconds, he's resisting--handcuffs are made to be incredibly easy to put on; if an officer can't get them on, the person they're trying to cuff is resisting.

Re: the last: storytime, folks.

I used to work on a river; the wharf was never a good place at night. I remember getting off shift at around midnight a couple years ago. Right after I clocked out I heard a bunch of screaming start up from where another one of our boats was moored, so I took off that direction. On the way down I passed a couple girls, maybe middle-school age, running the other way, clothes all shredded and shit. A bit further down a couple of my co-workers were laying into some guy. He was a big dude, maybe seven feet tall, and completely out of his gourd on something, ranting about God and stuff.

(As I found out later from the ladies who worked in our office, the girls had been out walking with their parents, who were too plastered to even really know what was happening, and the guy had run up and attacked them, but that's an unrelated fucked up detail.)

It took five us to keep him on the ground while we waited for cops and cracked half-serious jokes about knocking him over the head and dumping him in the water, and he was still almost getting loose. When they got there they tazed him to basically no effect before they tried cuffing him. Despite him being huge, drugged up, and flailing around like hell, it took two cops about ten seconds to get the cuffs on (and then four of them to bodily carry him off)

So there's an entirely useless bit of anecdotal evidence. Handcuffs are intentionally easy to get on. If someone's shouting "I'm not resisting!" but the cops can't get the cuffs on, the guy's full of shit and trying to put on a show for the camera.
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SalmonGod

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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #1872 on: July 14, 2016, 08:16:47 pm »

I agree with you about a large part of the problem being cyclical in nature, but I have no idea what your actual conclusions are.  You acknowledge vaguely that it's fucked up on the police end as well, but most of the more specific things you say put all the burden on protesters/victims of police violence.
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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #1873 on: July 14, 2016, 08:17:48 pm »

But when police are unnecessarily violent and too ready to use lethal force, that's thrown out the window. None of the social conditioning imposed on them matters, they're just racist shitheads willing to ruin their lives to kill some guy they don't know from Adam.

What planet do you live on that cops who gun people down ever receive anything but paid vacation for it? Seriously, unless some random bystander happens to get it on film the chances of a cop receiving anything but free paid vacation for killing somebody is incredibly small. It's less than 1% of police shootings that lead to any sort of criminal punishment. It is only in those extremely rare cases where some random passer by happens to video it that there is even the slimmest chance an officer will receive any sort of legal repercussions for killing somebody. There in lies the problems, the police are almost always above the law and they know it.

I used to be friends with coke dealer that did lots of blow with four local cops. They were real assholes.  One of them was a wife beater. All of them used to steal coke and guns out of the evidence room. Two of them were repeatedly accused of police brutality. None of them ever saw a lick of justice for their crimes. Do you know what their little mantra was when they would go on duty after snorting rails with my buddy? "Let's go ruin some lives." I'm not projecting this on them. This is literally what I heard them utter as a sort of rallying call before they headed off to go "serve and protect." I remember asking my buddy why he would hang out with such psychopathic assholes and his response was simply that it's better to have people like that on your side than against you. Anyway, the point of this little aside was these four cops were so fearless and flagrant about breaking the law that it seems impossible that it would never catch up with them yet to my knowledge none of them ever saw a single negative impact for any of the crimes they committed. Last I heard they are all still cops although that was almost ten years ago now. They were above the law and they knew it. People are much more likely to commit crimes when they know they will not be punished for it. This includes everything from petty stuff like stealing evidence all the way up to murder.
« Last Edit: July 14, 2016, 08:20:05 pm by Melting Sky »
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Re: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice
« Reply #1874 on: July 14, 2016, 10:58:41 pm »

I expected several tricks in the bodycam stuff, and hence clicked mildly/severely uncertain, though I did put mildly distrust police because it's the closest to my actual position: I don't see them as anything but a weirdly dressed stranger with a firearm who may think they can use force against me, and should be handled in a fashion that keeps them calm so they stay happy and go away.

I totally love the idea of say, replacing bodycams/augmenting dashcams with a mount for a quadcopter that deploys and tracks the officer/relays a feed to the vehicle, plus a HUD for the officer in the corner of their eye to give more perspective/situational awareness.
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